Speaker 1: Let's talk about fantasies. Scientific fantasies, of course, because every
Speaker 1: scientist out there has got one a dream scenario in
Speaker 1: which they discover something that shocks the world, or they
Speaker 1: stumble across some new species or an ancient artifact.
Speaker 2: If you've been.
Speaker 1: Listening to this podcast, then you can guess my scientific fantasy. It's,
Speaker 1: of course, first contact. I want to meet the aliens.
Speaker 1: But wait, you might think Daniel's no biologist. We know that,
Speaker 1: and he's admitted to having no nat for chemistry either.
Speaker 1: So what's Daniel's scientific interest in aliens? Well, the reason
Speaker 1: I got into physics was because I thought the topic
Speaker 1: was bigger than biology or chemistry. It doesn't try to
Speaker 1: solve just the puzzles of life here on Earth, which
Speaker 1: might only be relevant to life on Earth. Physics tries
Speaker 1: to understand the laws of the whole universe. Its questions
Speaker 1: are so much bigger they literally span the whole cosmos.
Speaker 1: How did the universe begin? What is it made out of?
Speaker 1: So alien contact is my scientific fantasy because I long
Speaker 1: believe that physics is something that should be cross planetary
Speaker 1: and cross species. I believe that somewhere out there was
Speaker 1: an alien Daniel working on particle physics, and I'd like
Speaker 1: to meet him and to make a mental connection over
Speaker 1: our common interest in the mysteries of the universe. Physicists
Speaker 1: don't need any bigger egos, but it's quite a boost
Speaker 1: to think that you're studying something that could be the
Speaker 1: topic of a galactic science conference. But is that just
Speaker 1: fantasy or is it on solid ground? Could it actually happen?
Speaker 1: I just wrote a book exploring this juicy topic. The
Speaker 1: book is called Do Aliens Speak Physics? And it's out now.
Speaker 1: Please pick up a copy. Today's episode is just a
Speaker 1: little taste of what the book dives into. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Alien Universe.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 4: I'm Kelly Wadersmith. I study parasites and space, and I
Speaker 4: am so excited that I finally get to meet Andy
Speaker 4: Warner on today's show.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel.
Speaker 1: I'm a particle physicist, and I want to meet aliens
Speaker 1: and talk to them about the nature of the universe
Speaker 1: or find out that they're bored by that question, either one.
Speaker 2: I'm excited about it, Daniel.
Speaker 4: None of us are surprised to find out that you
Speaker 4: want to meet aliens, so here's my question, since we
Speaker 4: are chatting with an amazing cartoonist today, do you have
Speaker 4: any artistic skills at all? Where do you stand on
Speaker 4: the art spectrum.
Speaker 2: I do do a lot of doodles.
Speaker 1: Actually they're embarrassing, so I would never show them to anybody,
Speaker 1: but I do enjoy doodling. I used to play this
Speaker 1: game with Hazel where she would pick a random object
Speaker 1: and then we would both dry without looking at each
Speaker 1: other's page, and then compare and you learn a lot
Speaker 1: about like how people imagine things and how they portray things.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. And for this book, I
Speaker 1: did a bunch of doodles. Sometimes you try to explain
Speaker 1: an idea and you need the visuals, and so I
Speaker 1: would do what are kind of embarrassing basic drawings to
Speaker 1: share with Andy, and then he would come back and like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're talking about this, and he would do this incredible
Speaker 1: sketch which really just captured all the ideas and conveyed
Speaker 1: them beautifully. So yeah, I'm a big fan of art.
Speaker 1: I do a little bit of art, but it's all
Speaker 1: private art that would never show to anybody except for
Speaker 1: my close collaborators.
Speaker 4: Excellent, my art skills are like, I don't even get
Speaker 4: the proportions right on stick figures. I am awful. And
Speaker 4: it was so embarrassing because I took parasitology and we
Speaker 4: were supposed to draw what we saw underneath the microscope
Speaker 4: and that was a big part of our grade. And
Speaker 4: all of my parasites were just blobs. This blob has
Speaker 4: a uterus over here that I put an arrow towards,
Speaker 4: and like, you just have to believe it was there.
Speaker 4: And then it got worse because I married an artist
Speaker 4: and at one point he was like, well, let me
Speaker 4: teach you how to draw, and I realized that I
Speaker 4: had just decided, well, I don't need to know anything
Speaker 4: because this is your job, right and I'm offloading this
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 1: And so, uh, I got the fish stuff covered, you
Speaker 1: got the drawing stuff covered.
Speaker 4: That's right, equal distribution of labor. But luckily you and
Speaker 4: I found people to work with who are good artists.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yes, it's a joy to collaborate with artists, isn't it?
Speaker 4: It is? It really is. I mean, especially because I
Speaker 4: think you and I really like to dig deep into
Speaker 4: topics and really get into the details, and it's hard
Speaker 4: for people to follow you on that journey sometimes and
Speaker 4: partly it's hard for them to follow, you know, one
Speaker 4: because it's complicated material. But two sometimes it just gets
Speaker 4: kind of exhausting, Yeah, to be like trying to understand
Speaker 4: complicated topics for too long. And so it's nice one
Speaker 4: to have an illustration that clearly shows it in case
Speaker 4: you're not imagining it right in your head. And two
Speaker 4: to give you a second to laugh and be like
Speaker 4: huh okay. And you know, if you get the joke
Speaker 4: because you got the science, that feels good too. It's
Speaker 4: like a nice payoff, you know. And then also like
Speaker 4: I love that our will show me that they're you know,
Speaker 4: seeing things in a different way than I am, and
Speaker 4: it makes me think about things differently. And anyway, it's
Speaker 4: a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's one reason why like this podcast is
Speaker 1: fun because it's not just like one person talking about science.
Speaker 1: It's a conversation and you help me explain the physics,
Speaker 1: then I help you explain the biology, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a back and forth there. And in these books
Speaker 1: where you have like a scientist and a cartoonist, there's
Speaker 1: also a back and forth between the dialogue, the written
Speaker 1: word and the cartoons. Right, they make fun of each other,
Speaker 1: they refer to each other, and you're right, that's much
Speaker 1: more interesting and relaxing because you need those little breaks,
Speaker 1: you need to back and forth. So it just doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like such a monologue.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Well, today we're going to hear a little bit
Speaker 4: more about this process. Andy's going to describe what it
Speaker 4: was like, so we don't just have to take your
Speaker 4: word for it, and we'll hear what it's like for
Speaker 4: the poor cartoonists working with us. And so today we're
Speaker 4: talking about your book. Do aliens speak physics? That's right,
Speaker 4: the greatest book ever, sure to be a New York
Speaker 4: Times bestseller, now available in all finebal stores. And so
Speaker 4: we we asked our audience to get this conversation started.
Speaker 4: Can we use physics to communicate with aliens? And let's
Speaker 4: see what our audience thinks. Given that Daniel talks about
Speaker 4: this all the time and we always love hearing about it.
Speaker 6: Physics is the basis of absolutely everything.
Speaker 5: We can't have a conversation just between two people without physics.
Speaker 5: So absolutely physics is the only way we could communicate
Speaker 5: with aliens. Physics and math are probably the most universal languages,
Speaker 5: so I would.
Speaker 6: Say probably yes. I think that if we make an
Speaker 6: experiment where the outcome is different from what the aliens expect,
Speaker 6: that would be interesting.
Speaker 2: What else would you like to use? Magic?
Speaker 7: Or verse chemistry, general relativity, and the speed of light
Speaker 7: in our conversations are more likely pen pal exchanges over
Speaker 7: centuries than a phone call.
Speaker 8: I'm actually of the mind that we probably never will
Speaker 8: encounter aliens.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure if we contact alliance, physics will be
Speaker 5: involved in some way or another. And doun say I
Speaker 5: couldn't be.
Speaker 6: I would think so because the only thing I can
Speaker 6: think of is using the bands of the electro magnetic
Speaker 6: spectrum to encode or entangle to send out communications.
Speaker 8: I don't know if we can use physics to talk
Speaker 8: to aliens, but if you figure it out, please let
Speaker 8: me know, because I'm pretty sure my stepmother is an
Speaker 8: alien and she is impossible to communicate with.
Speaker 3: Yes, because there must be some values or firm lass
Speaker 3: which are universal and we could base a recommunication on that.
Speaker 5: Communication requires some kind of shared experience or viewpoint, and
Speaker 5: I think physics could provide that. Yeah, because the distances
Speaker 5: are so great that they exceed human lifetimes. Can we
Speaker 5: even use physicists.
Speaker 4: I think we can and probably should.
Speaker 5: We can depict things like one thing and another thing
Speaker 5: equals to things numerically, and then we can display the
Speaker 5: pytheg orient theorem once.
Speaker 7: We get the units of measurement figured out. Yeah, using
Speaker 7: physics to talk to the aliens would probably work. It's
Speaker 7: the one coming thing that we can discuss. This is
Speaker 7: how fast light goes, and then that gives us their
Speaker 7: units of measurement, and we figured it all out and
Speaker 7: everything's wonderful. I'd rather a physicist was doing the talking
Speaker 7: rather than a politician, but it's obvious that the best
Speaker 7: scenario of the humanity would be to let me moderate.
Speaker 9: I think so. In fact, I think we're using basic
Speaker 9: physics on the voyager probes the records that will allow
Speaker 9: us to know and not communicate directly, but at least
Speaker 9: give an alien civilization a starting point on how to
Speaker 9: communicate with us.
Speaker 4: As always amazing answers, I had a good laugh at
Speaker 4: the step mom comments.
Speaker 2: And the chemistry joke of course, and the chemistry.
Speaker 4: Joke of course. Yep. But this is a question you
Speaker 4: have thought about a lot, and your co author Andy
Speaker 4: has thought about a lot. So maybe we should just
Speaker 4: jump right in and hear more about it.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So then it's my absolute pleasure to welcome my co
Speaker 1: author and collaborator and new favorite cartoonist to the podcast,
Speaker 1: Andy Warner. Andy is a non fiction cartoonist. He's the
Speaker 1: author of the New York Times best selling and hilarious
Speaker 1: book Brief Histories of Everyday Objects.
Speaker 2: He was a.
Speaker 1: Contributing editor at the NIB and teaches cartooning at the
Speaker 1: California College of the Arts at Stanford and at the
Speaker 1: Animation Workshop in Denmark. He works in South Berkley and
Speaker 1: comes from the sea.
Speaker 4: What does that mean, Andy, What does it mean to
Speaker 4: come from the sea?
Speaker 5: Well, I actually I grew up on a series of
Speaker 5: small islands, first sam Blast and Panama, then Saint Croix
Speaker 5: and the US Virgin Islands. That's where my sister was born,
Speaker 5: and then goes to spend a lot of time in Corsica.
Speaker 5: My dad is a marine biologist or was. He's retired now,
Speaker 5: and he studied sex changing fish while I was growing up.
Speaker 5: So for a summer job, sometimes I would be, you know,
Speaker 5: floating above a reef with a snorkel, counting off how
Speaker 5: many blue head wrasts there were, and there was always
Speaker 5: tubs out back where he and various postdocs were removing
Speaker 5: their go nads. It was a fun childhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I have two siblings and so we kind of grew
Speaker 5: up running around on these islands.
Speaker 4: I was a fish person when I was a baby scientist,
Speaker 4: and I love fish so much and blue headed rass.
Speaker 4: I read all about sex changing and what we know
Speaker 4: about the mechanisms behind that, and your childhood sounds absolutely
Speaker 4: amazing to me.
Speaker 5: So I didn't even need to talk to you about
Speaker 5: sneaker males. You already know the.
Speaker 4: Drill, totally know about sneaker mails.
Speaker 5: Nice, that's my party story, Like, let me tell you
Speaker 5: about sneaker males.
Speaker 4: Awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean it does sound like a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: But I noticed, Andy, but you didn't grow up to
Speaker 1: become a marine biologist. What does that say about your experience?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Much the less sorrow of my dad. He definitely was
Speaker 5: like he'll be the one. But you know what it
Speaker 5: did teach me is how to talk to scientists, because
Speaker 5: I grew up with him with all the people who
Speaker 5: was working with his friends, my parents' friends in these
Speaker 5: you know, somewhat isolated environments where there weren't a lot
Speaker 5: of other kids around, and so in the absence of that,
Speaker 5: I would talk to these grown ups. And talking to
Speaker 5: scientists is a really interesting thing because they are very
Speaker 5: fascinated by things, and so it taught me how to
Speaker 5: be interested in things that maybe I'm not specialized in,
Speaker 5: absorb their fascination, get fascinated by it in a similar way.
Speaker 5: And then you know, you go and swim and you
Speaker 5: see these fishs that they were talking to you about,
Speaker 5: and it makes the science very real. And so, you know,
Speaker 5: I ended up making a lot of comics about science.
Speaker 5: I'm a nonfiction cartoonist and I do history, but I
Speaker 5: also do science interpretation. And I like to think, or
Speaker 5: at least I like to tell my dad that his
Speaker 5: influences there.
Speaker 4: Well, so how did you learn to translate scientists? Because
Speaker 4: you're right with like, we as a group get really
Speaker 4: excited about stuff, but we're not always really good at
Speaker 4: explaining that to other people. You know, we like jump
Speaker 4: right to the mechanisms and we're talking about goodnetotrope and
Speaker 4: releasing hormone or something instead of like, yeah, how did
Speaker 4: you learn to communicate science to nonscientists?
Speaker 5: It's all about the asking questions, right, Like, these people
Speaker 5: know things. It's not just somebody at a party blathering
Speaker 5: on about something that they know nothing about. These are
Speaker 5: really specialists that have devoted their lives to you know,
Speaker 5: maybe it's somewhat esoteric knowledge to like the general public,
Speaker 5: but like they can break it down into its little parts.
Speaker 5: And so if you just sit there with somebody and
Speaker 5: you kind of probe them and you question them, and
Speaker 5: if you don't understand something, that's what you ask about.
Speaker 5: Now that leads you into a new direction. It's that
Speaker 5: technique that really gets me a lot of places is
Speaker 5: being nice and interested in what people are talking about
Speaker 5: and then asking them questions about it, you know, not
Speaker 5: just like absorbing it, because that also demonstrates to them
Speaker 5: that you're actually interested. A lot of people who have
Speaker 5: specialized have this experience where they talk about what they
Speaker 5: do to somebody whose eyes glaze over and they really
Speaker 5: part way through, oh I've lost this person, and so
Speaker 5: just not being that person they've lost being that person
Speaker 5: that's like, oh no, like tell me more. It's you know,
Speaker 5: it takes you along for the ride with them, and
Speaker 5: that's been a really fun part of my entire career.
Speaker 5: I mean, even with Daniel. Daniel was explaining a ton
Speaker 5: of stuff, and as we put this book together, it's
Speaker 5: one of my favorite parts about being the kind of
Speaker 5: cartoonists that I am.
Speaker 1: Frankly, I love how you talk about talking to scientists
Speaker 1: the way we think about talking to aliens, you know,
Speaker 1: as if scientists are the aliens. And so you're saying
Speaker 1: that this whole time we've been writing a book about
Speaker 1: talking to aliens, You've been practicing on me this whole time.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, absolutely.
Speaker 5: Firsthand knowledge. It is really interesting because scientists are often
Speaker 5: used to talking with each other and this kind of
Speaker 5: specialized language develops, and so as a layperson, like I'm
Speaker 5: sort of a professional layperson in a lot of ways,
Speaker 5: Like I talk to people and I get them to
Speaker 5: talk to me about what they're interested in and then
Speaker 5: breaking down And yes, Daniel, you're absolutely on the examination.
Speaker 4: So I'm interested in how this collaboration came about. And
Speaker 4: so maybe Daniel, So I know Daniel is the one
Speaker 4: who initially had the idea. So maybe Daniel, you can
Speaker 4: tell me about how you came up with this idea initially,
Speaker 4: and then we can talk about what it was like collaborating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, I'm of course interested in physics
Speaker 1: and like how does the universe work and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, But anybody who listens to the pod
Speaker 1: knows that I'm also really interested in philosophy, and not
Speaker 1: like weird abstract philosophy, but the context of the physics questions,
Speaker 1: like what does it mean that the universe is made
Speaker 1: of strings or springs or sprayings or whatever it's actually.
Speaker 2: Made out of.
Speaker 1: You know, to me, the reason physics is exciting is
Speaker 1: because of the philosophical implications of what we've learned. Space
Speaker 1: is curvy or it's not or whatever. The universe is
Speaker 1: infinite or it's finite. All those things have meaning. But
Speaker 1: you know, they have meaning if you think you're discovering
Speaker 1: the truth. They have less meaning if you think, hm,
Speaker 1: this is just our description of the universe, and maybe
Speaker 1: it's telling us just about ourselves and not the universe.
Speaker 1: I wanted to write a book about that by figuring out,
Speaker 1: you know, is physics the map or is it the
Speaker 1: territory itself? Also because a lot of physicists deeply believe
Speaker 1: that it's the territory and can't accept the concept that
Speaker 1: it's the map, and I was a little bit more skeptical.
Speaker 1: So I pitched this idea for a book to my
Speaker 1: fourteen year old at the time, and he was like,
Speaker 1: m boring, come on, I would never read that book.
Speaker 2: I know. I was totally crushed.
Speaker 1: Honestly, I was like, this is my passion project. But
Speaker 1: I also really respected his honesty.
Speaker 5: No better editor than a fourteen year old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, right exactly. Your kids will make you humble.
Speaker 1: But then I thought, well, how can I make this
Speaker 1: more fun? Well, maybe it's more fun if you think
Speaker 1: about why.
Speaker 2: It matters, you know, like, does it matter at all?
Speaker 1: Is it only of interest to philosophical interested people who
Speaker 1: smoke banana peels on the roof? And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: it matters if our description is human or if it's universal,
Speaker 1: if somebody else has a different description, and like who
Speaker 1: else might have a different description, Well, you know, alien scientists.
Speaker 1: And so it was fun to imagine what might happen
Speaker 1: when aliens arrive and we get to talk to their
Speaker 1: scientists and learn like, oh, are we describing the universe
Speaker 1: or is it just our description of.
Speaker 2: Our experience of it?
Speaker 1: And I went back to my fourteen year old and
Speaker 1: I was on pins and needles, and he was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would read that book, and so boom, I was
Speaker 1: off to the races.
Speaker 4: Has he read the whole book?
Speaker 2: He has read the book?
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, I mean he and my daughter read it
Speaker 1: and they both contributed some jokes.
Speaker 4: So that's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know Katrina has not yet read the book
Speaker 1: though I know, yes, she's on spouse probation for that.
Speaker 1: But you know, I also wanted a book that was
Speaker 1: really accessible, and you know, I know a lot about physics,
Speaker 1: and you guys know, the translating physics to what everybody
Speaker 1: else out there can understand is not always easy, especially
Speaker 1: when you're really close to the topic, and it's sometimes
Speaker 1: hard for me to remember, like which of these concepts
Speaker 1: are intuitive, ones are really a struggle to get over,
Speaker 1: and what is the journey to really incorporating them. So
Speaker 1: it's important to me to work with somebody who was
Speaker 1: good at translating ideas, who knew how to speak to
Speaker 1: aliens or physicists or alien physicists. And so I was
Speaker 1: a big fan of Andy's work. I knew about it already.
Speaker 1: I'd read his book, I followed his comics and so
Speaker 1: I just cold emailed him to see if he was
Speaker 1: up for this kind of collaboration.
Speaker 4: And so, what did you think, Andy, when Daniel pitch
Speaker 4: this alien idea. Were you like, oh my gosh, a
Speaker 4: crackpot has sent me an email, or were you like, what,
Speaker 4: this is a great idea.
Speaker 5: Well, of course I was into it from the immediate
Speaker 5: second I popped up in my email inbox. I'm like, hello,
Speaker 5: I'm a physicist and I want to write a book
Speaker 5: about aliens with you. It's a dream. I'm a cartoonist.
Speaker 5: As long as I was on like a fishing scam,
Speaker 5: I was on board.
Speaker 1: Oh it still could be, It still could be, It still.
Speaker 5: Could It's really elaborate.
Speaker 2: Exactly, I do the long con.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you need those bank account details for the book tour.
Speaker 5: This is pretty standard in the industry. That's what I'm talking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, that's what I tell my husband.
Speaker 5: Also, yeah, exactly, a very elaborate fishing scam bound.
Speaker 4: That's right. Yes, I'm committed.
Speaker 5: So yeah, I responded as quick as I could before
Speaker 5: I emailed some other cartoonists, and I said, yes, of course,
Speaker 5: this sounds really interesting. Let's get on the horn and
Speaker 5: talk more about it, and so I think we did
Speaker 5: a zoom meet up and just kind of discussed back
Speaker 5: and forth, and it immediately became apparent to me that,
Speaker 5: you know, this wasn't just a guy who was interested
Speaker 5: in aliens and knew some stuff about physics, which obviously
Speaker 5: Daniel is, but you know, he was approaching this project
Speaker 5: using it as like a framing device, as a way
Speaker 5: to look at all these really interesting, really profound, sometimes
Speaker 5: frankly unsettling questions that are just out there in the
Speaker 5: air around us, and if you care to look at them,
Speaker 5: you can have a pretty crazy time digging deep into them.
Speaker 5: It's just most of the time you choose to focus
Speaker 5: on other things. And this book really digs into the
Speaker 5: fundamental pieces of how science came to be what we
Speaker 5: consider science, the paths of it. I mean, one of
Speaker 5: the things I love that Daniel brought to this with
Speaker 5: this notion of rather than the progression of science being
Speaker 5: this sort of like path, this river moving ever forward,
Speaker 5: it's that it's this kind of you know, so river system. Sure,
Speaker 5: this progress, but there's these dead ends, these streams come
Speaker 5: out and then they rejoin.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: It's this really braided thing, this braided object, rather than
Speaker 5: this just like path up the mountain to the peak
Speaker 5: the summit, and you know, I'm I'm really interested in
Speaker 5: how people frame things because it's how you tell a story,
Speaker 5: it's how you get across information. And so the fact
Speaker 5: that Daniel was able to take this very high concept
Speaker 5: idea of the fundamental nature of the universe and marry
Speaker 5: it to this like really grabby idea of just talking
Speaker 5: to Aliens, I mean I was I was sold. And
Speaker 5: then the more we were working together, it just never
Speaker 5: wasn't fun, which is a great thing about working on
Speaker 5: a book, you know, like there was always a new
Speaker 5: thought experiment and a new way to consider the idea.
Speaker 5: You know, like we get into our perceptions of the world.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that was fun about working
Speaker 5: with Daniels he has a very He's as excited to
Speaker 5: learn new things as I am. And so we would say,
Speaker 5: you know, we need to learn how dogs do it,
Speaker 5: we need to learn how cuddle fish do it, like
Speaker 5: what were the Mayans up to? And so like there
Speaker 5: was this like exhilarating collaboration where we were just continually
Speaker 5: bouncing stuff off of each other until the book went
Speaker 5: to print. Frankly, and you know, and I think we
Speaker 5: got somewhere interesting with it too. It's it's this. It
Speaker 5: deals with pretty profound ideas in a very silly way,
Speaker 5: but that doesn't make them not profound.
Speaker 1: Awesome, Yeah, and we really wanted the book to be
Speaker 1: accessible and to be fun, because yeah, it does deal
Speaker 1: with pretty weighty issues, but we didn't want people to
Speaker 1: feel like this is a dry academic text about philosophy
Speaker 1: or even one of those like popular science books that
Speaker 1: from a great famous person that you read and you
Speaker 1: feel like, I'm in the presence of great ideas, but
Speaker 1: I don't really get them, you know, those books.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Our style is sort of like in the tradition of
Speaker 1: like your book, Kelly, A City on Mars, and you know,
Speaker 1: with Randall Munroe's book What If, and like all the
Speaker 1: way back to like logic comics, where like you're touching
Speaker 1: on deep, abstract, philosophical, fundamental stuff, but you're making it
Speaker 1: fun and accessible. And I think the key to that
Speaker 1: is cartoons, because they are fun and they make you
Speaker 1: feel like, hey, how serious could we be Anyway? We're
Speaker 1: like making dad jokes and there's you know, silly drawings here,
Speaker 1: and Andy, I think is really underselling himself because he
Speaker 1: did a lot of the translation, like, I you know,
Speaker 1: I tried my best to make these ideas understandable. But
Speaker 1: the way you ask great questions, Kelly, so does Andy,
Speaker 1: and he's like, what does this really mean? And I'm
Speaker 1: not getting it and keep explaining it until it makes sense.
Speaker 1: And then of course the cartoons really bring it together
Speaker 1: and add that note of levity that you need is
Speaker 1: a break. You know, you're like, whoa, I really swallowed
Speaker 1: a big concept here. Okay, I need to laugh, right,
Speaker 1: you know, nobody can think hard for like twenty pages straight.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's a reason why the New Yorker
Speaker 5: has gag cartoons or yeah, exactly exactly helps the medicine
Speaker 5: go down easy.
Speaker 4: When you were clearly having a lot of fun with
Speaker 4: the comics, Andy, and so tell us about what was
Speaker 4: your process for like figuring out what the aliens would
Speaker 4: look like.
Speaker 5: I mean, I gave myself a lot of leeway because
Speaker 5: one thing that was fun about this book is that
Speaker 5: from the get go, we're just like, we have no
Speaker 5: idea what it's going to be like, Like not even
Speaker 5: any guests, right, Like anybody that says they have a
Speaker 5: guess is putting you on, and so we were always
Speaker 5: interested in breaking stuff down too, it's constituent parts. And
Speaker 5: because we were doing that with history of science, with philosophy,
Speaker 5: I felt complete artistic license to do that with anatomy,
Speaker 5: especially goopiness kind of dripping blobs and things like that.
Speaker 5: And so what I would try to do is just
Speaker 5: make them as different from the last one that I
Speaker 5: had drawn, which was a fun experiment, and it's very
Speaker 5: similar to how I sketch. I kind of sketch naturally
Speaker 5: these little monsters in my sketch books, and so as
Speaker 5: an outgrowth of that, it was just like, make these
Speaker 5: little monsters. Maybe this one is a floating orb. Maybe
Speaker 5: this one has a thousand limbs. Maybe this one has
Speaker 5: a bunch of eyes. What do alien eyes look like?
Speaker 5: Let's dig into that, and then you know, what are
Speaker 5: these aliens doing? Usually they're in conversation with a human
Speaker 5: in some sort of humorous way. And that was a
Speaker 5: fun thing to me because it kind of demonstrates one
Speaker 5: of the powers of cartooning, because the whole book is
Speaker 5: about how difficult it is to connect with aliens, right
Speaker 5: to find this common ground. Is it even possible? Maybe
Speaker 5: it's not. And so then almost every cartoon in it
Speaker 5: is this human speaking in English in a bubble to
Speaker 5: an alien. Right, it almost works counter to the concept,
Speaker 5: but because that's a cartoon, it acts instead as a commentary.
Speaker 5: And so often these little characters are like a little
Speaker 5: Great Chorus or something like that, where they're commented on it,
Speaker 5: they're adding a joke, they're undercutting the authors, they're making
Speaker 5: fun of us often and the reader just takes it
Speaker 5: and strive it's funny to them, and it then maybe
Speaker 5: hopefully deepens the experience, because you know, they're reading about aliens,
Speaker 5: you might as well get to see a few.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, So, what was the hardest comic you had to
Speaker 4: do for the whole thing? Because I know for Zach
Speaker 4: there's always like an image where he just can't draw
Speaker 4: the thing the right way, And so was there a
Speaker 4: particular one that you got hung up on?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean a lot of the diagrams and stuff
Speaker 5: like that. Daniel, Daniel will help me with them. And
Speaker 5: that's a very fun thing, is that Daniel, you know,
Speaker 5: using whatever graphics program he does, will put together these.
Speaker 1: Little cartoons embarrassingly kludgy.
Speaker 5: They're not embarrassing Daniel, they're beautiful, and then I'll I'll
Speaker 5: draw over them. And so having somebody around to really
Speaker 5: help me out with the kind of nuts and bolts
Speaker 5: of what I needed to get right was good. But
Speaker 5: in terms of the difficulty, I mean, I really had
Speaker 5: a lot of license because we start every chapter with
Speaker 5: sort of a science fiction fable, almost a hypothetical scenario,
Speaker 5: and so most of the time I was drawing the comics,
Speaker 5: I was drawing aliens and humans interacting, sometimes in a
Speaker 5: fictional setting with the hypothetical scenarios, so I could get
Speaker 5: as crazy as I wanted to. You know, I wasn't
Speaker 5: like having to get every single part of a diagram
Speaker 5: right as I would and like say, in a city
Speaker 5: on Mars, if you mess up the way that look,
Speaker 5: somebody's gonna call you out on it. Yeah, nobody seen
Speaker 5: me aliens.
Speaker 4: A little bit of that happened, but that's all right.
Speaker 1: And that was one of my favorite moments, is getting
Speaker 1: the first draft of Andy's drawings, because you know, we
Speaker 1: have this text we've been working on and then it's
Speaker 1: time for him to illustrate it, and I get to
Speaker 1: be the first person to see these and like they
Speaker 1: always just added so much humor and levity and clarity
Speaker 1: to the work. So I was really glad for how
Speaker 1: the whole thing went. I had a great time.
Speaker 5: We also ended up cutting a bunch of them too.
Speaker 5: I mean I over we also overwrote. Oh my god,
Speaker 5: cal the little.
Speaker 1: Draft was like Kelly knows because she read the first draft.
Speaker 1: She read the whole first draft, which is like two books.
Speaker 5: I loved it.
Speaker 4: I wish you could have kept it all.
Speaker 5: It was a great We were having a lot of fun.
Speaker 5: There was like an extended sequence about Harvey wallbangers we
Speaker 5: rarely got into. We had to cut a lot of jokes,
Speaker 5: but we also you know, it's it's good. I think
Speaker 5: in writing humor, to overwrite and then cut down you
Speaker 5: end up on a stronger product. But you know, some
Speaker 5: of my favorite little gags ended up on the cutting
Speaker 5: room floor. But I always remember the aliens.
Speaker 4: So how did the co writing process work then with
Speaker 4: you two, Well, we.
Speaker 1: Would put together an outline just to make sure we
Speaker 1: were sort of aligned with where the book was going,
Speaker 1: what topics are we going to cover, what is the
Speaker 1: big idea? And then I would write a first draft
Speaker 1: and send it to him and he would cut a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff and ask me questions and revise a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff, and then also add a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1: Because Andy's not just a cartoony st also knows a
Speaker 1: lot about the history of science and history in general,
Speaker 1: and so he wrote a bunch of the chapters on
Speaker 1: like you know, the path of science and where things
Speaker 1: have gone, and added a bunch of wonderful details. And
Speaker 1: then we would go back and forth, and then when
Speaker 1: we thought the text was in shape, and you would
Speaker 1: do a draft on the comics, and then I would
Speaker 1: comment on them, which meant like, Wow, I love this one.
Speaker 2: No, I love this one.
Speaker 1: Ooh, this one's amazing ha ha ha lol, really sharp comments.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're very critical.
Speaker 2: I was trying to be. I really was. I was like,
Speaker 2: what can I add? I don't know. I could just
Speaker 2: tell them which ones I laughed at.
Speaker 5: It helps, it really does. It was such a collaborative process. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we I don't know. We would go through maybe like
Speaker 5: three to four ping pong backs so for each chapter,
Speaker 5: because we ended up again, we you know, we would
Speaker 5: cut a bunch and then add a bunch back in.
Speaker 5: And it's hard at this point reading through it to
Speaker 5: remember I mean, you know, I did all the heart
Speaker 5: physics on that. Yeah, But aside from this stuff that
Speaker 5: I really just can't wrap my tiny little brain around,
Speaker 5: A lot of the style has sort of melded into
Speaker 5: the hybrid of Dan Andy two dad joke styles. I
Speaker 5: think we have a similar sense of humor that made
Speaker 5: it easy and a similar urge to kind of meander around.
Speaker 4: It was fun, amazing. Well, thank you both for sharing
Speaker 4: information about the process of working on this. Let's take
Speaker 4: a break, and when we get back, let's talk about
Speaker 4: how do we know aliens even do science? We're back,
Speaker 4: I am grilling Dan Andy. What did you say that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, Andy? About do aliens speak physics? So let's
Speaker 4: jump into some of the science here. So why do
Speaker 4: we even think that aliens do science?
Speaker 1: I think we hope that aliens do science, and that's
Speaker 1: part of just like our human projection, you know, the
Speaker 1: question of like, are we the only intelligent species in
Speaker 1: the universe, which is an ancient question and one that
Speaker 1: resonates with everybody. The fact that we ask that question
Speaker 1: says that we think intelligence is important. Right, We're not
Speaker 1: just out there looking for like slime molds on other planets.
Speaker 1: There's a specific kind of alien we want to meet,
Speaker 1: and that kind of alien is similar to us, because
Speaker 1: the important thing about us is that we're intelligent. But also,
Speaker 1: for me, the important thing about us is that we're
Speaker 1: trying to unravel the nature of the universe, where this
Speaker 1: weird part of the universe that looks inward and tries
Speaker 1: to understand. And so I think we are very curious
Speaker 1: about whether aliens are like us, and so that's why
Speaker 1: we want to know, like do they think about the
Speaker 1: universe the way that we do. But you know, part
Speaker 1: of the book is trying to make the strongest case
Speaker 1: against those assumptions so that we can really figure out,
Speaker 1: like how do we know? And so even though there
Speaker 1: are some things that seem obvious, like well, if aliens
Speaker 1: are technological and they figured out how to travel the stars,
Speaker 1: then obviously they must know how you know, space works
Speaker 1: and how to bend it or how to curve it
Speaker 1: or how to create wormholes and they can explain it
Speaker 1: to us. But you know, that's an assumption. And so
Speaker 1: in the book we dig into that very question, like
Speaker 1: is it actually necessary to do science to think about
Speaker 1: the universe as a puzzle that you're trying to unravel
Speaker 1: in order to master technology that lets you navigate the stars.
Speaker 5: Right, And we have so many examples even in just
Speaker 5: human history, of humans developing wildly complicated technologies with very
Speaker 5: little conception of what's going into those technologies on a
Speaker 5: fundamental level, like what makes them work. We're very willing
Speaker 5: to then improve, you know, iterate on those technologies. I mean,
Speaker 5: think about blacksmithing, metallurgy, right, I mean or breadmaking, you know,
Speaker 5: these things that are not necessarily intuitive to the human brain.
Speaker 5: We're able to harness and derive incredible complexity from with
Speaker 5: really no knowledge of how it actually works. And so
Speaker 5: that gives you this idea that maybe you could have
Speaker 5: this very technologically advanced alien species that just kind of
Speaker 5: iterated there and doesn't have that curiosity that makes them wonder,
Speaker 5: what is the fundamental basic part of the universe? Is
Speaker 5: there a fundamental basic Maybe they just don't care. Maybe
Speaker 5: they just sort of iterated their way into warp drives
Speaker 5: and ended up on our front door and they just
Speaker 5: want to sample our food. We have all these assumptions
Speaker 5: because we got there and because we're curious in this
Speaker 5: very specific way. And one thing that we do over
Speaker 5: and over again. That's kind of fun in this book
Speaker 5: is sort of a rug pull where we get people
Speaker 5: hyped up about a possible connection. Then we say, oh no, no, no,
Speaker 5: pull the rug out, and then we dig deep into why.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult
Speaker 5: to connect in that way than you would.
Speaker 4: So I've got a question for you then, Andy. So
Speaker 4: when Daniel was, you know, answering the question, it seemed
Speaker 4: pretty clear to me that what he was saying was
Speaker 4: that if he ended up on a planet and they
Speaker 4: made sourdough bread but they didn't understand why, and that
Speaker 4: was where they maxed out, he would be really disappointed.
Speaker 4: If you got to a planet and the aliens made
Speaker 4: sour dough but didn't know why it worked, but they
Speaker 4: were would you still be excited about meeting those aliens?
Speaker 5: I'd still eat the sour dough. I mean, we actually
Speaker 5: we have a hypothetical situation. One of our little chapter
Speaker 5: starters has this hypothetical situation where we have this group
Speaker 5: of aliens that arrives and everybody meets them and they
Speaker 5: explain some stuff, and the physics meet them, and you know,
Speaker 5: there is this communication and they're just not interested and
Speaker 5: what the physicists are interested in, and the physicists kind
Speaker 5: of walk away disappointed while everybody else is having a party.
Speaker 5: So we have that, We imagined that exact scenario where
Speaker 5: I'm kind of chilling eating the sour dough with Daniel's
Speaker 5: weeping in a corner.
Speaker 4: Do you think there are going to be alien cartoonists?
Speaker 2: Ooh?
Speaker 5: I mean I would say that cartooning is simply a
Speaker 5: fundamental at the universe. I cannot conceive.
Speaker 4: Why live in a universe without cartoons? I agree, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 1: But I also want to defend myself a little bit there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm making it sound like our book is
Speaker 1: a bit of a wet blanket, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: like your book, Kelly Yep.
Speaker 4: I was gonna call us the wet blankets, but now
Speaker 4: it sounds like you're trying to back out.
Speaker 1: No, I think the answer either way is fascinating and wonderful. Like, look,
Speaker 1: either the aliens do science the way that we do
Speaker 1: and have a lot in common with us intellectually and emotionally,
Speaker 1: because science is emotional, right, It's this curiosity that drives us.
Speaker 1: It's it comes from within us. It's not rational either.
Speaker 1: They are similar to us in that way, in which case, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we can have a lot of fun like cooking up
Speaker 1: sour dough and standing at chalkboards right in lagrangeons and
Speaker 1: figuring out the mysteries of quantum gravity. It's going to
Speaker 1: be a great party. Or they're not, and they're more
Speaker 1: alien than we can imagine. And that's sort of what
Speaker 1: the book is exploring. But I don't think that that's
Speaker 1: a negative outcome, you know. That's really interesting. That's when
Speaker 1: we learn about ourselves, when we learn like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: there are assumptions we've been making in this whole time
Speaker 1: we didn't even realize we were making. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like the you know, the equivalent of traveling to another
Speaker 1: country and discovering that they don't have coffee for breakfast
Speaker 1: and you're like, what you have spicy fish soup or
Speaker 1: like this other weird thing for breakfast, or like what
Speaker 1: that's fascinating?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: How disappointing would it be to go to another country
Speaker 1: and just discover Starbucks everywhere?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And so yes, you get your Starbucks on when you're
Speaker 1: in Thailand or whatever, and that's nice, but it's more
Speaker 1: interesting in some ways to not get that, because that's
Speaker 1: when you learn about yourself and you learn about what's
Speaker 1: possible out there.
Speaker 4: You must be so good at writing grits. Whether I
Speaker 4: get the answer I want or I don't get the
Speaker 4: answer I want, it's interesting either way, and I would
Speaker 4: fund your grant.
Speaker 1: Dat he'll oh, thank you, yes, yes, well you know
Speaker 1: that is the case in particle physics.
Speaker 2: We publish no matter what.
Speaker 1: Find something published, don't find something published.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's that's how you have thousands of publications
Speaker 4: job security.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, exactly.
Speaker 4: So we got a question from a listener, Sarah. So
Speaker 4: let's go ahead and listen to that question real quick
Speaker 4: and I'll see what you two think about the answer.
Speaker 10: Daniel and Kelly. This is Sarah from Lousville, Kentucky. My
Speaker 10: question is our opposable thums necessary for the development of
Speaker 10: tools and technology? Would aliens need to have fingers and
Speaker 10: sums to make spaceships to visit us? Thank you and
Speaker 10: keep up the good work.
Speaker 4: All right. So I love that we got a biology question,
Speaker 4: sort of biology adjacent. I think the one of the
Speaker 4: only other organisms that have opposable thumbs is it pandas
Speaker 4: And they use it to hold bamboo.
Speaker 5: Raccoons.
Speaker 1: Raccoons, Ah yeah, garbage.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, no, raccoons, dude, I.
Speaker 4: Love it.
Speaker 5: They're still spreading, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just because raccoons are your neighbors in Berkeley, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's alias you can't go through because there's signs
Speaker 5: posted about how they'll beat you up and take your life.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, it's great. Yeah, they're made of much
Speaker 4: s turner stuff in Berkeley than they are out here.
Speaker 4: They definitely run from us out here.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should send in the National Guard to clear
Speaker 1: out the raccoons.
Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely, yeah, don't give anybody any ideas. But in
Speaker 5: all seriousness, I mean, an interesting aspect of this book
Speaker 5: actually is that biologists have actually spent a lot of
Speaker 5: time already thinking about aliens. It's this part of the
Speaker 5: thought experiments that people have already engaged them that we
Speaker 5: turn to to write this book. Actually, there's already books about,
Speaker 5: you know, how humans evolved and how unique our evolutionary
Speaker 5: path may be compared to other environments, you know, ammonia
Speaker 5: based life forums, things like that, and so we actually
Speaker 5: already had, you know, this sort of rich tradition of
Speaker 5: thought experiments of writing to look to for this book,
Speaker 5: and the answer is, of course no. Like opposable thumbs
Speaker 5: they've developed a few times. It's great, they're super useful,
Speaker 5: but there's a lot of different ways to articulate things
Speaker 5: in the world and engage in tool use. I mean,
Speaker 5: dolphins attached to spunge to their nose as they dig
Speaker 5: around and the inner title or I guess it's for
Speaker 5: in the sand. But you know, we have all these examples,
Speaker 5: even just on Earth, of pretty complicated tool use developing
Speaker 5: and being engaged in with animals that don't have these
Speaker 5: opposable thumbs. Don't get me wrong, they'd be really useful
Speaker 5: and it'd certainly be fun to meet aliens with the
Speaker 5: possible thumbs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to give kudos here to the
Speaker 1: biologists because they really have done their homework much more
Speaker 1: than the physicists have. Well, you know, imagining like what's
Speaker 1: beyond the box of our Earth assumptions. You know, what
Speaker 1: could alien life be like? As Andy says, you know,
Speaker 1: does it have to be based on carbon? Could it
Speaker 1: be silicon? That's exactly the kind of thinking I think
Speaker 1: physics hasn't done enough of, you know, looking back inwards
Speaker 1: and saying like, well, where are we making assumptions? Where
Speaker 1: could things have gone differently? And so, yeah, biologists have
Speaker 1: done a lot of this, but this is a great question,
Speaker 1: and I think there are examples of like fairly intelligent
Speaker 1: critters on Earth, like octopus. They're very smart, and they
Speaker 1: obviously can interact with their environment. They have these grippers,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But they don't have opposable thumbs. So I
Speaker 1: think the heart of Sarah's question essentially is like, do
Speaker 1: you need some way to manipulate the environment so you
Speaker 1: can like build up on stuff and interact with it
Speaker 1: in a sophisticated way. And I think that's probably is required.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if that's possible underwater, you know, if
Speaker 1: it's possible to develop as complex tools underwater, you know,
Speaker 1: like can you do metallurgy, can you extract minerals? You know,
Speaker 1: I think that might be required some sort of land
Speaker 1: based thing. But again, you know, that's just our one experience.
Speaker 1: Who knows great questions?
Speaker 4: Sarah, Yeah, so are you ruling Enceladus out then as
Speaker 4: a place where we'll find intelligent life because there's just
Speaker 4: too much water.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to having my mind blown by being
Speaker 1: wrong about that when we discover alien technology under the
Speaker 1: surface of Enceladus.
Speaker 5: Well, okay, I mean one one interesting thing that we
Speaker 5: while we're on the subject of hands and thumbs that
Speaker 5: we get into with this book, and Daniel kind of
Speaker 5: was probing at this as how much of our own
Speaker 5: the way we do science and what we're curious about
Speaker 5: is literally our structure, how our bodies are, the ten
Speaker 5: digits on our hand that form how we count things,
Speaker 5: the fact that we're bipedal, and so our neck cranes
Speaker 5: up to look at the sky pretty easily, and so
Speaker 5: we wonder about the stars in a way that may
Speaker 5: be an animal on all fours that it's slithering around
Speaker 5: just simply wouldn't. And so a lot of the way
Speaker 5: that we track the development of science may actually come
Speaker 5: down to our very human form. And so if an
Speaker 5: alien evolves this entirely different way, they may have just
Speaker 5: a very different alien preoccupations based on something as simple
Speaker 5: as them not having thumbs. Right, Yeah, that may be
Speaker 5: the fundamental difference.
Speaker 4: So the genus Homo has been around for a long time,
Speaker 4: and we've had this sort of general body shape, but
Speaker 4: we haven't, as far as I know, been doing science
Speaker 4: the whole time. When would we say that we started
Speaker 4: doing science?
Speaker 1: Man, that is such a deep question, and I know
Speaker 1: that they like typical popsie explanation is like, well, Galleo
Speaker 1: and Francis Bacon decided to do experiments about five hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, and then science began, and we've been doing
Speaker 1: science ever since. And you know, that's like true, maybe
Speaker 1: at the very zoomed out level, but when you look
Speaker 1: at it, like most stories, it's much more nuanced and
Speaker 1: interesting because people have been doing experiments for much longer
Speaker 1: than Galileo and Bacon. You know, even the Greeks, like
Speaker 1: they tested stuff out. I think this simplified cartoon.
Speaker 4: Version, watch it, watch it.
Speaker 1: I do mean cartoon in a derogatory way.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, Wow, I just realized I said that this oversimplified
Speaker 1: version there you go, doesn't tell the true story because
Speaker 1: people have been as Andy said earlier, they've been doing
Speaker 1: stuff for a long time, but they've also been sometimes
Speaker 1: wondering why does it work, and how does it work?
Speaker 2: And what is the mechanism.
Speaker 1: They haven't always figured it out, and the technique for
Speaker 1: figuring that out has definitely evolved. But also it's evolved
Speaker 1: since that, you know, moment of the scientific revolution. The
Speaker 1: way we do science today is not the same as
Speaker 1: the way we did science five hundred years ago. We
Speaker 1: don't just have experiments anymore. For example, now we have
Speaker 1: like simulations. Here's a whole new category of this of
Speaker 1: scientific investigation that didn't exist before, you know, in vivo
Speaker 1: in vitro, in silico. You know, so we don't know
Speaker 1: like what the future holds. Also, so science is like
Speaker 1: a gradually evolving process. The science itself is not a
Speaker 1: static idea.
Speaker 5: I just love the idea of science not being a
Speaker 5: static idea. I think that was one of the things
Speaker 5: that really drew me to the book was Danielle articulating
Speaker 5: that in the first email he sent to me. And
Speaker 5: the idea of you know, a lot of concepts that
Speaker 5: we have being these kind of living things that are
Speaker 5: re examined and evolved and maybe had a few different
Speaker 5: times that they were quote unquote invented and then fused together.
Speaker 5: I think Daniel's ability to perceive that is frankly what
Speaker 5: jurmany of the project in the first place cool.
Speaker 1: And I think it's fascinating because it lets you imagine
Speaker 1: how aliens might be doing science, and like, maybe they
Speaker 1: don't do science at all, as we talked about, but
Speaker 1: also maybe they do some super crazy advanced version of science.
Speaker 1: You know, we've added to our technique for building knowledge
Speaker 1: about the universe. There's no reason to imagine aliens a
Speaker 1: million or billion years more advanced than us have developed
Speaker 1: some new technique and they look back at ours and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh my god, y'all are so primitive. You're
Speaker 1: still doing that. It takes so long to figure out
Speaker 1: the universe. They might think about us the way we
Speaker 1: think about you know, this hypothetical scenario of aliens who
Speaker 1: are not interested in all at how things work, right,
Speaker 1: And so even just a question of like do we
Speaker 1: do science the same way tells us so much about
Speaker 1: our history and the assumptions we're making about the way
Speaker 1: that intelligent critters can understand the universe.
Speaker 4: YEP, I love the conversations about that in the book.
Speaker 4: All right, so let's assume that we get to meet
Speaker 4: aliens one day, which would be awesome. What would be
Speaker 4: some challenges communicating with them? What would would you imagine
Speaker 4: that would be?
Speaker 1: Like, well, I mean number one is are we talking
Speaker 1: to the alien physicists or the alien cartoonists, right, I.
Speaker 4: Think we should let Andy answer this one first.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean it's from the get go it's a more
Speaker 5: difficult prospect than you think, right, because we have a
Speaker 5: bunch of examples, even just on Earth, of things that
Speaker 5: demonstrate a clear intelligence, clear complex behavior that changes contextually,
Speaker 5: Like all these things. You know that we're looking for
Speaker 5: overn governywhere like this makes humans and we have to
Speaker 5: redefine it every time a biologist like raises their hand
Speaker 5: and says, well, actually right, there's like a bunch of
Speaker 5: other species that do that, but we can't. You know,
Speaker 5: we find actual communication with these other organisms very difficult,
Speaker 5: if not impossible, right, like people you know on TikTok
Speaker 5: they have those boards where the dog presses the buttons
Speaker 5: the talk like come on, give me a break, And
Speaker 5: we basically made dogs like dogs are a human project action.
Speaker 5: You know, that fundamental issue that we deal with here
Speaker 5: on Earth with all of our species client or not
Speaker 5: is something that would immediately come up with aliens. It's
Speaker 5: just you know, where is that point of connection, where
Speaker 5: what is communication and how does it actually happen? And
Speaker 5: so that's why you know, we go down this Karl
Speaker 5: Segan route of finding the most basic things you could
Speaker 5: talk to one another about. But you know that dream,
Speaker 5: that Star trek dream where everybody's got the communicators and
Speaker 5: stuff like that, Like we don't have those for dolphins,
Speaker 5: and they're right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And you know, we don't have a concrete answer to
Speaker 1: this question, of course, because we haven't met the aliens,
Speaker 1: which is why we have to do this biological game
Speaker 1: of like, let's look around on Earth and try to
Speaker 1: imagine what the most difficult communication scenario is on Earth
Speaker 1: and then make it ten times harder to imagine what
Speaker 1: it's like for the aliens. And as Andy says, we've
Speaker 1: already stumbled. Right, we can't communicate with whales. We know
Speaker 1: they're talking to each other, but we don't know what
Speaker 1: they're saying. But also we have trouble communicating with humans, right,
Speaker 1: Like translating human languages is possible when you have like
Speaker 1: two existent populations who can like point to stuff and
Speaker 1: say this is an apple, that's an apple. But when
Speaker 1: you have when one of those populations is gone but
Speaker 1: they've left a bunch of written writing behind, we really
Speaker 1: struggled to figure out what they're talking about, even if
Speaker 1: we have enormous numbers of examples, even if we have
Speaker 1: a lot of culture in common obviously the same biology,
Speaker 1: without like crazy cheat sheets like the Rosetta Stone, we
Speaker 1: may not have even ever translated Egyptian hieroglyphics. And there
Speaker 1: are still ancient human texts that we don't know what
Speaker 1: they mean. And so if we don't know how to
Speaker 1: do it for humans, if it's like too hard for humans,
Speaker 1: then like one are the chances we're gonna be able
Speaker 1: to decode an alien message? And you know, like we've
Speaker 1: received weird messages from space. I don't know messages, but
Speaker 1: signals from space like the Wow signal? Right, what does
Speaker 1: that mean?
Speaker 2: We don't know.
Speaker 1: We don't know how to translate it. Is it encoded?
Speaker 1: How is it encoded? How would you know if you
Speaker 1: decoded it correctly?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: We don't know.
Speaker 1: And that's the whole problem, is that there's always an encoding.
Speaker 1: You can't take an idea and just give it into
Speaker 1: somebody else's head. You have to pass through some sort
Speaker 1: of symbols, and those symbols are always fundamentally going to
Speaker 1: be arbitrary and cultural. They reflect who you are and
Speaker 1: what you think about those ideas. And as Andy mentioned,
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan made a great effort on the Pioneer Plaque
Speaker 1: to try to communicate with some potential alien civilization that's
Speaker 1: going to pick up the Pioneer probe. And you know,
Speaker 1: before we rag on him, which we're about to, we
Speaker 1: should say that NASA only gave him like two weeks
Speaker 1: to come up with this. They're like, oh, wait, last
Speaker 1: minute idea. Maybe we should add a message to aliens?
Speaker 1: Can you have one by twosday? So he did a
Speaker 1: great job for you know, the time constraint. But in
Speaker 1: the end, what he drew on the Pioneer plaque and
Speaker 1: you know, it's like a again cartoony version of the
Speaker 1: hydrogen atom.
Speaker 4: You mean, the best of what we're able to do.
Speaker 4: When you say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, done by good looking people. You know, it's
Speaker 1: our sort of mental image. And of course he avoided
Speaker 1: any English, and he even avoided like math. He was
Speaker 1: just trying to come up with pictograms that he thought
Speaker 1: would inspire in alien minds the same idea. But you know,
Speaker 1: I showed the Pioneer Plaque to a bunch of grad
Speaker 1: students here at U c Irvine to get a sense
Speaker 1: for like does this work even on the same biological
Speaker 1: construct for physics grad students, and they had no idea
Speaker 1: what this thing was, you know, they were like, I
Speaker 1: don't know. They came up with clever interpretations, but nobody
Speaker 1: got anywhere close to what Carl Sagan was thinking. And
Speaker 1: it just highlights like how difficult it is to invent
Speaker 1: a communication system that really is universal. You can't do it,
Speaker 1: and this whole like linguist and philosophers of language who've
Speaker 1: worked on this and they've concluded it's essentially impossible to
Speaker 1: translate a language without those people around to like point
Speaker 1: it stuff.
Speaker 5: What blanket club or you should still buy your books, that's.
Speaker 4: Right, support the community of wet blanket people.
Speaker 1: And that's why in the book we don't focus on
Speaker 1: this SETI like scenario where we get a message and
Speaker 1: we're like writing back and forth to the aliens over
Speaker 1: thousands of years. Instead, we imagine the aliens are here,
Speaker 1: we have a physical context together where we can point
Speaker 1: at apples and try to use that to build up
Speaker 1: a communication system, because that potentially could actually work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, even just you're using the word cartoony
Speaker 5: is actually a good example to talk about like the
Speaker 5: way that visual language is so contextual, right, Like comics
Speaker 5: is the art of simplification, like down to the dots
Speaker 5: of the eyes and like a triangle for a No,
Speaker 5: somebody unfamiliar with comics does not recognize that as a
Speaker 5: human face necessarily, or like you know, the sweat beads
Speaker 5: going like that's like this is contextual stuff that people
Speaker 5: familiar with the language are like, Oh, I understand that
Speaker 5: somebody unfamiliar needs to be taught, right. You extrapolate that
Speaker 5: out to the universe, and my god, good luck.
Speaker 4: I think there are these Japanese comics where when they're sleeping,
Speaker 4: there's like a bubble coming out of that bubbles. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I had no idea what that was. I was
Speaker 4: like eight A, I know all why it is. My
Speaker 4: daughter's like, why do they all have snot bubbles and
Speaker 4: she's like, no, they're sleeping, mom, And I don't get
Speaker 4: bubbles when.
Speaker 5: I'm sleeping, you, I mean, I don't know. Like, sweat
Speaker 5: definitely does erupt from my head whenever I'm nervous, but.
Speaker 2: That's that's just I see.
Speaker 1: That's the equivalent of like a string of z's coming
Speaker 1: out of somebody's mouth.
Speaker 2: You might be like, what fascinating?
Speaker 4: So the wet blankets need to go grab a little
Speaker 4: bit more tea, and when we're back, we're going to
Speaker 4: talk about whether or not aliens do math. All right,
Speaker 4: the wet blankets now have our tea, and that's right,
Speaker 4: that's right, we're back. And so so in the book
Speaker 4: you also deal a lot with the question of how
Speaker 4: do we know aliens will do math? Because you know,
Speaker 4: often people will be like, well, well, just communicate in math,
Speaker 4: because it's like this most this basic thing. We must
Speaker 4: all share it. But you know, as what blankets, you
Speaker 4: have to critically examine that. So what do you think?
Speaker 1: I think that's a really fun idea, and it is
Speaker 1: a powerful idea. And I actually got to talk to
Speaker 1: Noam Chomsky when writing this book. Yeah, because he famously
Speaker 1: answers all of his emails, which is incredible and one
Speaker 1: reason why I tried to do the same thing. I'm
Speaker 1: not nearly as famous as NOMSCONSI. I'm sure he gets
Speaker 1: more emails about aliens than I do. But I wrote
Speaker 1: to him and asked him what he thought would be
Speaker 1: a good protocol for beginning a conversation with aliens, because
Speaker 1: like very smart dude obviously thought about language, and he
Speaker 1: actually wrote back and I had a conversation with him,
Speaker 1: and his basic argument was aliens will do arithmetic, and
Speaker 1: so we can connect with them on the concept of
Speaker 1: like one plus one equals two, which he thought was universal.
Speaker 2: And we can argue the other side of this in
Speaker 2: a minute.
Speaker 1: But it is really fun to think through, like how
Speaker 1: do you go from one plus one equals two? You
Speaker 1: to like explain to me how you build a warp drive.
Speaker 1: There's some really interesting and fundamental concepts there, because over
Speaker 1: the last one hundred years or so, mathematicians have been
Speaker 1: digging into the basis of math, and they've been wondering, like,
Speaker 1: where do the rules of math come from? How is
Speaker 1: it all connected? What are the smallest number of axioms
Speaker 1: you can begin from and then build up all of
Speaker 1: human mathematics. What are the foundational rules? And they discovered
Speaker 1: something really cool, which is that it's all based on arithmetic.
Speaker 1: Like if you start from I know how to add
Speaker 1: numbers and have a recipe for going from smaller numbers
Speaker 1: to bigger numbers for putting them together, then you can
Speaker 1: derive like calculus and linear algebra and differential equations. All
Speaker 1: of the cool, amazing, fantastical math we have comes from arithmetic,
Speaker 1: and I think this is where Noam Chomsky was coming from.
Speaker 1: He's like, you start there and you can build up
Speaker 1: to everything else. That is really the foundation of how
Speaker 1: we think and express ourselves. And of course all of
Speaker 1: modern physics requires fancy math. But in the end, it's
Speaker 1: all just arithmetic.
Speaker 4: But has arithmetic always been the same, Like, if you
Speaker 4: go back to ancient cultures, do they do arithmetic the
Speaker 4: same way that we do? Is it really that basic?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really cool question because obviously people have
Speaker 1: been doing arithmetic for thousands of years, right, but it's
Speaker 1: only like one hundred years ago people formalize what the
Speaker 1: rules are. Like before that, arithmetic was more like a
Speaker 1: bunch of examples, like I can write down thirty plus
Speaker 1: thirty one equals sixty one. How do I do arithmetic
Speaker 1: for some new set of numbers I've never seen before?
Speaker 1: You need like a rule that applies always. So yes,
Speaker 1: people have been adding numbers the same way, but only
Speaker 1: recently have they like found those fundamental rules that underlie
Speaker 1: all of it. And it's really cool because those rules
Speaker 1: are kind of computational. They're like a little recipe like
Speaker 1: if you have a number, how do you get to
Speaker 1: the next one? And you can build up from there.
Speaker 1: And so the next thing Chomsky said was, yeah, you
Speaker 1: start from arithmetic and then you go to computer programs,
Speaker 1: because if arithmetic is like a little bit of computation,
Speaker 1: then you can go from there to like the simplest
Speaker 1: kind of computer. And this is something Alan Turing figured
Speaker 1: out like almost a century ago, is that there is
Speaker 1: a basic computer, a way to describe like the most
Speaker 1: simple way to do computation to like manipulate information. It's
Speaker 1: called the Turing machine. And you can go from like
Speaker 1: how does arithmetic work? Thinking about that as computation, to
Speaker 1: building up to a Turing machine. And then if you
Speaker 1: can exchange basically computer programs with the aliens, then you
Speaker 1: can encode really complex ideas and you can go from
Speaker 1: there to like here's the Lagrangen of quantum field theory,
Speaker 1: you know, or here's why sleeping people have snot bubbles
Speaker 1: or whatever, right, basically everything. And so this is the
Speaker 1: idea is like try to find the fundamental ideas, start
Speaker 1: from there and use that to build up to the
Speaker 1: more complex because incredibly the world is organized that way,
Speaker 1: or our ideas are. They're built on these few foundational
Speaker 1: concepts from which you can extrapolate.
Speaker 4: So could you help me understand how we get from
Speaker 4: understanding arithmetic to explaining, you know, for example, the endocrine system.
Speaker 4: So I can sort of understand how math helps you
Speaker 4: explain physics and biology absolutely has math. I don't want
Speaker 4: to imply it doesn't. But how does math help you
Speaker 4: understand something like the endocrine system? How would you explain
Speaker 4: that to an alien? Once you have math as a foundation,
Speaker 4: is the idea that the computer program lets you do it?
Speaker 5: After that?
Speaker 1: Well, to answer that, I'd have to understand the endocrite system.
Speaker 1: Though I actually do understand it.
Speaker 4: It's complicated a.
Speaker 1: Little bit because of Concuter's diabetes, but fundamentally the endocrine system,
Speaker 1: as you say, there's a mathematical model for it. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, these things create those things, and you put
Speaker 1: insulin in the cell and the sugar goes across the barrier.
Speaker 1: And though we have a very rich sort of experience
Speaker 1: with it, fundamentally it is a mathematical description.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We're talking about number is going up and down in
Speaker 1: their relationships with each other the differential equations. One of
Speaker 1: the reasons the endocrine system is complicated because it is
Speaker 1: a bunch of differential equations. And so if you can
Speaker 1: go from a arithmetic two computer programs, you can use
Speaker 1: those computer programs to describe models, right, to build models
Speaker 1: of an endocrine system. Then you can be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is my model of the endocrine system. This connects
Speaker 1: to this part, and this connects to that part, and
Speaker 1: so you can make those links between your mathematical model
Speaker 1: and what's happening in reality.
Speaker 4: Clearly, you should be one of the delegates on the
Speaker 4: first group that gets to talk to the aliens.
Speaker 1: I want to be the second group actually.
Speaker 4: Because the first group might get eaten.
Speaker 1: Yes, we'll send in the biologists and the cartoonists for
Speaker 1: the first group. Okay, but you know, all this assumes
Speaker 1: that aliens do math the way that we're talking about
Speaker 1: that one plus one equals to one alien planets, and
Speaker 1: nobody's being Terrence Howard.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 1: We're not suggesting that you know, one times one equals
Speaker 1: two or or something crazy, but that there are human
Speaker 1: assumptions in even in arithmetic. You know, the idea of
Speaker 1: oneness or twoness. And here We're going to sound totally
Speaker 1: like bonkers philosophical for a minute, but these are of
Speaker 1: the questions we're asking, you know, like would aliens come
Speaker 1: up with this concept that one plus one equals too?
Speaker 1: It's not that one plus one doesn't equal to around
Speaker 1: some alien planet, but that they might never arrive at
Speaker 1: that mathematics because they might not like care about the
Speaker 1: distinctions between things. You know, saying one plus one equals
Speaker 1: to requires a few basic assumptions, like saying that a
Speaker 1: thing is a one thing, which means it has an edge, right,
Speaker 1: you're distinguishing it from the rest of the universe. And
Speaker 1: where is that edge anyway? Like where does an apple
Speaker 1: end and the universe begins? Or where does my body
Speaker 1: end and the universe begin? These are cultural dotted lines
Speaker 1: we're drawing around stuff because it makes sense to us,
Speaker 1: and as Andy says, that's our context, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If you like grow up in the atmosphere of a
Speaker 1: star and everything is sort of fluid and constantly merging
Speaker 1: into itself, maybe you're never like drawing those dotted lines.
Speaker 1: Maybe that seems totally made up, and like, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: you can invent weird mathematics based on those arbitrary dotted lines,
Speaker 1: but maybe they're mathematics is based on real numbers instead
Speaker 1: of integers. You know, it's all continuous and fluid.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 4: So let's say that we do we meet those aliens
Speaker 4: and we find a way to communicate with them through
Speaker 4: math and computer programs. Do you think that they would
Speaker 4: have made some of the same discoveries as us, Like,
Speaker 4: would they have gone on the same path that we
Speaker 4: went on.
Speaker 5: One thing that is really fascinating about science as the
Speaker 5: way humans practice it, at least, is how dependent it
Speaker 5: is on our own very human fascinations, right, our preoccupations,
Speaker 5: Like my dad with the sex changing fish, right, he
Speaker 5: devoted his life to that, and now we all know
Speaker 5: that much more about sex changing fish, and it's great.
Speaker 5: But had he not fallen in love with a blue
Speaker 5: head wrass, maybe that wouldn't have happened and we would
Speaker 5: know that much less. And so science as humans practice it,
Speaker 5: you know, it doesn't you don't get an assignment or rarely,
Speaker 5: I mean maybe in Soviet Russia, but you know you
Speaker 5: it's usually based on your preoccupations, your fascinations, and then
Speaker 5: that kind of drives the whole thing forward because somebody
Speaker 5: else gets fascinated by what you were fascinated by and
Speaker 5: what you found and what you explained to them, and
Speaker 5: they get preoccupied by it, and then they develop it
Speaker 5: and make it more complex and it compounds and ladi
Speaker 5: da da da. But it all comes down to this
Speaker 5: very human brain becoming interested in something. And what humans
Speaker 5: become interested in is very human, right. I mean, we
Speaker 5: evolve to protect ourselves, to pass on our genes and
Speaker 5: to you know, exit right like, and so whatever works
Speaker 5: in service of that is probably what we're preoccupied by,
Speaker 5: what we're fascinated by in some way. You know, there's arts,
Speaker 5: there's all these things that you can get into that
Speaker 5: aren't you know, the basic things that help you not
Speaker 5: get eaten by the lion. But the circumstances that aliens
Speaker 5: evolved under are by necessity going to be different. I
Speaker 5: mean it would be. So it's unlikely enough we're going
Speaker 5: to meet aliens having an alien walk out of the
Speaker 5: alien ship and it looks like andy would be you know,
Speaker 5: it's unimaginable. And so whatever you're dealing with, you're dealing
Speaker 5: with an organism, something intelligent that has evolved to survive
Speaker 5: a completely different set of circumstances and so therefore has
Speaker 5: a completely different set of interests that have just shaped
Speaker 5: the path of its science. And so from that level,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's going to be pretty wild and wooly
Speaker 5: compared to ours. I mean, maybe they're maybe there's these
Speaker 5: questions that are fundamental they can dig down into that
Speaker 5: preoccupy them. But what gets them there, what gets them
Speaker 5: to that fundamental question, is going to be a different
Speaker 5: path than the one that took us there, And so
Speaker 5: it's going to look different to an outsider, i e.
Speaker 3: Us.
Speaker 1: And even if they are like biologically identical to us,
Speaker 1: like take the most extreme version of this, where there's
Speaker 1: just humans on planets all over the galaxy. Right, even
Speaker 1: in that scenario, how similar would their science be to ours?
Speaker 1: Because if you want to imagine, like we're meeting these folks,
Speaker 1: we're having an interplanetary science conference, we want to see
Speaker 1: if we're at the same place or were asking the
Speaker 1: same questions to have answers to our puzzles. Right, and
Speaker 1: even if they are humans, then they're very likely going
Speaker 1: to have taken a different.
Speaker 2: Path through science.
Speaker 1: And as Andy suggests, like if you look back to
Speaker 1: the history of our science, you can find all these
Speaker 1: moments when science pivoted on a happenstance, like an accident,
Speaker 1: and we talked about some of these on the podcast.
Speaker 1: You know, somebody leaving something in a drawer over the
Speaker 1: weekend and then coming back and developing it anyway, even
Speaker 1: though that doesn't really make sense, and discovering radioactivity and
Speaker 1: X rays and all these things were discovered accidentally, and
Speaker 1: it could have happened one hundred years earlier or one
Speaker 1: hundred years later, And the path of science depends on
Speaker 1: these things. And so even alternate earths, we think, probably
Speaker 1: would have a very very different path through science. Even
Speaker 1: if you believe that there's one fundamental explanation to the
Speaker 1: whole universe, that there is an answer out there that
Speaker 1: is discoverable, we're probably all climbing different sides of sort
Speaker 1: of physics mountain, which is fun to think of about,
Speaker 1: you know, if you imagine what would we like to
Speaker 1: meet all those folks. But we can also do something
Speaker 1: more concrete, which is to look back into the history
Speaker 1: of the Earth before we've had sort of one global
Speaker 1: scientific community, you know, when we weren't as connected and
Speaker 1: so like the Mayans and the Chinese and the Greeks.
Speaker 1: They all developed sort of initial proto scientific mathematical approaches
Speaker 1: to understanding the universe independently.
Speaker 2: And that's sort of like the.
Speaker 1: Best we can do without actually meeting the aliens to
Speaker 1: try to figure out, like how universal is it at
Speaker 1: least you know, in the human biological brain to begin
Speaker 1: on the same path, or you know, is it vastly different?
Speaker 1: And so in the book we dig deep into what
Speaker 1: the Mayans were up to and how the Chinese mathematical
Speaker 1: structure was different.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot
Speaker 2: about history.
Speaker 4: That's one of the things I love about this book
Speaker 4: is that it's so interdisciplinary. You get a lot of
Speaker 4: history and a lot of philosophy and a lot of science.
Speaker 4: And I learned a lot also while writing it.
Speaker 1: That was also a terrifying part of the book, because
Speaker 1: there's a long tradition of physicists writing books outside their
Speaker 1: discipline and embarrassing themselves, and I did not want to
Speaker 1: add to that canon. So I sent each of these
Speaker 1: chapters to like an eminent scholar in that field, like
Speaker 1: did I misrepresent this? I'm reading this this way? Is
Speaker 1: that right? And so I was always on pins and needles.
Speaker 2: When we got those.
Speaker 4: Reviews back, your humility will pay you back. I'm sure
Speaker 4: that that was a good thing to do.
Speaker 1: I mean, you'd rather hear you're wrong about it before
Speaker 1: you publish the book than after.
Speaker 4: Yes, yep, that was absolutely my attitude. We also sent
Speaker 4: our chapters out to experts. I'm like, please, like, be
Speaker 4: as brutal as possible. I want you to tell me
Speaker 4: that I'm wrong in secret, that's right, that's right exactly,
Speaker 4: and can you spoil the ending a little bit? Were
Speaker 4: the Chinese, Babylonian Mayans approaches to these things super different
Speaker 4: or were they pretty similar?
Speaker 1: They were similar in some ways and different in others,
Speaker 1: Like everybody started from wow, the sky is really interesting,
Speaker 1: and there seemed to be patterns and let's describe those mathematically.
Speaker 1: But they were also different, Like the Greeks are very geometric,
Speaker 1: you know everything. The answer to every question in Greek
Speaker 1: astronomy is like where are things in three D space?
Speaker 1: Whereas the Chinese were more like algebraic. They're like tables
Speaker 1: and patterns that they would use, and to them that
Speaker 1: was an answer which is really fascinating. Even though like
Speaker 1: the Chinese sort of early model of the universe has
Speaker 1: sort of geometric inconsistencies, and you can see in the
Speaker 1: early literature some Chinese scholars were like, hold on a second,
Speaker 1: if you're saying this and that, then how do eclipses happen? Hmm, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe let's just not think about that. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: there are different ways of thinking about it.
Speaker 5: The tradition of sweeping things under the rug goes a lot, yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, because to them the answer was in geometry,
Speaker 1: it was algebra. Also, we see like the different cultural importance.
Speaker 1: Like to the Babylonians, which became the Greek tradition, this
Speaker 1: is like foundational and became like really the core of
Speaker 1: modern intellectual thought, whereas to the Chinese, like this was
Speaker 1: useful and it was important politically, but then they got
Speaker 1: really interested in things like, you know, material science and
Speaker 1: gunpowder and astronomy didn't play as deeply important a role
Speaker 1: in their culture. So it's really fascinating to see sort
Speaker 1: of the similarities and the differences.
Speaker 4: All Right, Well, I highly recommend the book. It's amazingly
Speaker 4: well researched, it's super clear, it's funny, the comics are amazing.
Speaker 4: I highly recommend that people should go out and get
Speaker 4: to aliens speak physics. And you too are amazing little
Speaker 4: little you too, You too are amazing collaborators. I'm sorry
Speaker 4: I talked to my kids.
Speaker 1: Well, you too are my favorite two collaborators. I've been
Speaker 1: working with both of you for years on fun topics,
Speaker 1: so it's a joy for me to talk to both
Speaker 1: of you.
Speaker 9: Yay.
Speaker 5: It was an honor to be on the show, and
Speaker 5: it was an honor to make this book with Daniel too.
Speaker 5: This was such a fun time and it was also
Speaker 5: so fun to talk to you about it. Kelly had
Speaker 5: such good questions.
Speaker 4: Well that's because Daniel were it be an outline, but
Speaker 4: it was, it was I know how well. It was
Speaker 4: great to meet you Andy, Thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 5: Want to rest.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much everybody.
Speaker 4: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We
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